


A Man Apart

by TheFlashFic



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers For Both Shows, canon 'death'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 20:33:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2886605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry finds out about Oliver's death. Just a little bit of introspection. From an anon prompt on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Man Apart

It’s Roy who calls him.

Felicity would have, Roy says, but she isn’t thinking. She’s devastated. Of course she is, and instantly Barry wants to run the 600 miles to Starling to check on her. Oliver is her boss, her friend. Her Iris.

But when he hangs up, he sits there in his lab and stares out at nothing for a while.

_Guys like us don’t get the girl_ , Oliver told him once. Barry remembers thinking how incredibly stupid that was at the time, because Felicity was right there. Oliver had her and he didn’t even realize it. All he had to do was reach out the slightest bit. She already knew his secrets. She helped him, she loved him. He was so lucky, but he had this…this martyr complex, this thing that made him think that everything he did and felt and went through was separate from what anyone else went through. There was humanity, and then there was Oliver Queen, standing on the sidelines.

Barry was flattered that Oliver said ‘guys like us’. Like there was humanity, there was Oliver Queen, and Barry Allen, of all people, was invited to stand beside him.

But Barry never did get off on thinking he was special in any way. His tragedies never defined him, and his powers won’t define him now. He saves people, sure. So do the cops he spends at least forty hours a week surrounded by. He has special abilities, so do a whole bunch of other people.

Besides, where Barry stands, wherever he is placed in the rank and file of the world, he needs Joe and Iris there too, and Caitlin and Cisco, and Wells, and his dad.

Nothing lives in a vacuum. Nothing is completely of itself. Energy, like matter, is neither created nor destroyed. There is always a chain of causality, a million loops that tie someone – no matter how unique – to absolutely everyone else. There is no specialness that is enough to make someone truly apart from the rest of humanity.

Barry likes that. He’s comforted by it. He doesn’t want to be unique. He was the kid with the dead mom and the killer dad, that was enough to wear him off uniqueness really fast.

He can’t help but think that if he had time, maybe he could have convinced Oliver to think a little more like him. To seek out ways to be part of the world, instead of ways to separate himself further.

But Oliver is dead. Guys like them…they die. 

Barry was feeling low even before the call. The man who murdered his mother got away, his dad spent another Christmas in prison. Iris has been avoiding him since he confessed his feelings to her. He’s been spending a lot of time at STAR, training, trying his hardest to give Dr. Wells everything he wants. But he’s just going through the motions.

Cisco has texted him near-constantly the last few days. A stream of consciousness collection of texts, at first digging for Barry to tell him if anything’s wrong, and now just whatever sort of _'So I never dug the idea of fusion cuisine but sriracha on tacos, holy gour-mazing_ ' thoughts occur to him. 

Barry rarely responds, but when he’s more himself he’ll thank Cisco sincerely, because each text almost makes him smile.

But now Oliver is dead.

It won’t take long for everyone to hear about it. Oliver Queen is a celebrity, of sorts. A real life Tony Stark, and even though he fell out of fortune people are still fascinated by him. Like a movie, like a comeback story they can witness in real time.

It’ll make the papers. People will be talking about it. They’ll find out at STAR, Iris will hear, Joe will hear. Barry will have to share it, talk about it, smile and tell people he’s okay, assure Joe that he’ll be safer than Oliver was. Go to Starling, comfort Felicity, make sure Digg isn’t overcome with rage. Go to a funeral.

So for now he just sits in his lab, before he has to share this with anyone else.

Barry Allen isn’t separate. He’s not a man apart like Oliver is. Was. But these days there aren’t many people he doesn’t have secrets from. There’s not much about himself he’s free to share with anyone and everyone. It’s no longer his first instinct when something happens to find the people closest to him so they can experience it with him. And that’s the worst part of his new life, that it’s changing him, his personality and his instincts, in ways he doesn’t like.

Oliver was helping him. He would call now and then, usually at obscene hours of the night, and he’d offer some quick tip he just thought of that Barry needed to know about. How to tell if a person’s armed in one glance, how many separate escape routes he should plan out before engaging a bad guy in a closed space.

“You’re not a fighter,” he said to Barry one night, not long after Barry’s last visit to Starling. “You  _can_  win fights using your speed, but if you win with tricks then, trust me, you’re eventually going to lose.”

And he did. He lost, the first time he went up against someone with the same kind of abilities he has.

Oliver could have helped him with the man in yellow. He could have given advice, maybe told some stories about somebody he didn’t beat until Barry felt better. He could have come to Central City and helped Barry hunt the man down. Barry would have listened to him. He would have stood by and let arrows be shot into people. When it comes to this one man, Barry has no morals.

But now Oliver can’t help him, and he’s starting to feel like he can’t help himself. Maybe the problem with not being a man apart is that it’s hard to find faith in just himself alone when he needs it.

Oliver was the strongest person he has ever met, and Oliver faced his own enemy and died. Barry leans on everyone he knows. How can he possibly hope to stand on his own feet now? 

He needs Oliver. He needs advice, he needs someone to understand the parts of this life that Barry’s other friends can’t. He needs to learn and grow.

No, he needs to get up and start running. Starling is an hour away, and Felicity needs him. This isn’t about Barry and his own problems. Oliver’s death is about Oliver, and the people who love him. It’s the worst time ever to start being selfish. 

But it’s hard, really hard, to push himself up away from his desk. 

The chime of his phone tells him he has a text. He picks up his phone, dreading, but relaxes when he sees Cisco’s name. 

_Hey, you ever just stop and think about the color orange? I mean, what the hell?_

Barry needs to stand on his own, to go where he’s needed. He needs to not think about himself. But he taps Cisco’s name and holds his breath as the phone rings. 

Cisco sounds cheerful as always when he answers. “Seriously? Orange? That’s what gets a response?” 

"I need to talk to somebody." 

"You know my address, get your ass over here," Cisco answers without missing a beat. "I’ll put on some coffee."

Barry hangs up and pushes out of the chair. He needs to go to Starling, yeah. There are people he cares about who must be hurting too badly to function. But he’s not Oliver Queen, as much as he sometimes wants to be. He isn’t a man apart. He needs people, and if that makes him weaker…then he’ll just have to be weaker. 

That’s something he’s pretty sure he can live with. 


End file.
